The Ninth Man

The profound readings come across as profoundly shallow. At least the ones
in English do; not even fast-changing Reform Judaism dares change a word of
the Hebrew Scripture. Which is something else to thank God for on this
beautiful Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the English doesn't get the same,
preservationist care. As if English could not be a sacred tongue, too, every
jot and tittle waiting to be fulfilled.

How sum up this new prayer book's prose style - sleek contemporary? Safely
ecru? I'm reminded of what Robert Alter, the Biblical translator, once said:
The problem with the King James Bible is that the translators' Hebrew was
shaky; the problem with every translation since is that its English is
shaky.

It's clear that this latest revision of the prayer book is supposed to be a
step back towards tradition, yet it retains much the same Choose One from
List A, Two from List B quality. It is full of optional readings and sweet
little poems in no tradition but Hallmark's.

It's a testament to the archaic yet never dated Hebrew of the Sabbath
service that not even this new edition can disguise its awesome power. The
worshipper is not only led but confronted. The ancient words strike to the
core - like a childhood rhyme that one realizes in old age means a lot more
than a childhood rhyme.

The old prayers put together so long ago - whether in Babylon or over the
course of many an exile and homecoming since - still admonish and forgive,
cast down and raise up, fill one with sorrow and hope. Age cannot wither nor
custom stale their infinite power; they only increase the appetite they
satisfy.

In the end, as the rabbis say, the two most difficult things about studying
Scripture are entering it and leaving it. It's taken me a while to get to
services, I realize, but now that I'm here, I'm going to hate to leave. No
wonder we all linger over the bread and wine afterward.

I realize now that I've brought the world in with me, that I'm still in it,
that I've not come here as a desperate petitioner throwing himself on the
mercy of the court, a patient who needs to be healed, a sinner who wants to
be made clean and whole again. Instead, I've dropped in like some tourist in
a museum, passing superficial judgments on the exhibits right and left
rather than entering into the art. Which is one more sin to be confessed.

Out of habit I look around and silently count the sparse attendance this
Saturday morning. Jewish tradition frowns upon counting
people. It's associated with taking a census, and whenever a census is
taken, it's seldom been good for the Jews. A census means another tax,
another restriction on where we may live outside the ghetto or mellah or
Pale of Settlement, another increase in the number of Jewish conscripts for
the czar's army, another order to report at dawn for Resettlement in the
East. So I count to myself. There are only eight of us
today, not even enough for the traditional minyan, the quorum of 10
worshippers traditionally required for communal prayer. I'm sent back to
childhood, to those times when evening prayers might be held in the back of
my father's shoe store because another shopkeeper on the street needed to
say Kaddish. That's the prayer recited on the anniversary of a loved one's
death - a parent, a spouse, a brother or sister, or, God forbid, a child.
When there weren't 10 men present, I'd be dispatched to spread the word that
we needed a 10th.

Everyone I asked would invariably put down whatever he was working on and
come. It was a good deed, an honor, a special blessing to be the 10th man,
the one who made the service possible.

Actually, we might need an additional two or three to make a minyan, but my
request wasn't entirely misleading. Just because we needed an 8th or 9th
man, too, didn't mean we didn't need a 10th. It occurs to me that I've been
sitting here only a few minutes and already I'm thinking like a Talmudist.

Just as we begin the service, we're joined by one more worshipper - the 9th.
Well, I think, we almost made it. Close but no minyan.

Then I think again: Isn't it a greater thing to be the 9th rather than the
10th worshipper, to be the unrecognized worker who lays one more brick in
the edifice unheralded, rather than he who sets the capstone to much ado?
Isn't it better to join the common effort for its own sake, even if it does
not succeed, perhaps especially if it does not succeed, rather than wait for
the honor of completing it?